Fig. 2: Immune mediators results.

A Percent change from pre to post intervention in each cytokine, by group. Significant group-by-time interaction effects were found in the levels of TNF-α, IL-17, IL-23, MCP-1, IFN- γ, and IL-12. See supplementary Table 6 for details. B Cumulative distributions of the percentage of change in each cytokine level, the chart shows data only for participants for which there was a decrease greater than 5% in each specific mediator when comparing pre and post intervention levels (See supplementary Fig. 2 for details). There was a significant difference between the test and control groups across all cytokines - TNF-α, IL-17, IL-23, MCP-1, IFN- γ, and IL-12. C Correlation network diagram of immune mediators in the Test Group. Nodes represent individual cytokines, with edges indicating significant correlations between individual changes from pre to post intervention (p < 0.05, FDR corrected). Edge thickness corresponds to the strength of the correlation, while edge color represents the correlation direction, ranging from blue (negative correlation, -1.0) to red (positive correlation, +1.0). Larger nodes indicate cytokines with higher overall correlation strength. Edge locations maintain relative similarities among immune mediators using MDS (See methods). The dense network structure suggests strong interconnectivity among key immune mediators, particularly IL-23, TNFα, IFNγ, IL-17, and IL-12, indicating potential coordinated immune responses under test conditions. See supplementary Table 7 for details. (all p-values are FDR corrected for multiple comparisons, *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01).